The Pirate’s Guide to Sales Book Review

📅 14th June 2021 | 2020/21 Sales Book Reviews

Sustainability thrives and dies with the lifetime customer

The Pirate’s Guide to Sales is an absorbing read. It’s amusing in parts with plenty of technical stuff you’d expect from a modern sales book, albeit published before the great lockdown. Authored by a young man called Tyler Menke (who is from the other side of the pond), it will give the newbie or sales rookie a firm grasp as to how ‘sales is now done’ – and give them an insight into nautical matters too, particularly if they are ‘landlubbers’.

What’s New

I bet you’ve never heard of ‘hornswaggle’ have you? Well, a quick Google search will reveal the answer. Tyler Menke has done a great job in putting together a book which explains sales (or should I write sails) in such an unusual manner. Essentially, the pirate ship is you, your plan and your staff or colleagues. This covers the first part of the book. The second part is all to do with how you navigate those choppy seas and find your treasure – or the ‘Points of Sail’. Really clever.

There are references early in the book to amongst others, Ray Dalio, Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman and Dale Carnegie. So straight away, the reader gets an some insight into behavioural science, behavioural economics and psychology – and how these peripheral sciences are now applied in mainstream business activity. Such a refreshing change from the authors who are sales methodology regurgitators and those who still think that closing is the be all and end all of sales. It isn’t.

I make a habit of turning to the back of any new book I haven’t picked up or read beforehand to check out the indexing, notes or bibliography. The Pirates Guide doesn’t disappoint. In addition to a superb, and very slick, summary entitled ‘Quick Recap On The Voyage Now Taken’, there are numerous blank pages for note taking, a comprehensive list of attributions and book titles, the 25 Tips you will learn after reading the book – and my favourite, two pages; one with THE printed in the middle and another with END.

What’s Old

Many will know or at least will have heard of the S.M.A.R.T. method of setting personal goals. Some suggest that these ought to be S.M.A.R.T.E.R. The ‘ER’ being Evaluate and Re-Adjust. The author explains how SMART works for him and he rounds off the Chapter Four with this piece of sales wisdom – ‘Goal setting is nothing new to those of us in sales, but getting the most out of your goals can always be improved’.

Planning and preparation are key to sales success and I did enjoy the various passages in Chapter Seven which is all about mapping out your territory using some basic and more sophisticated methods like Pareto’s Law and Bayes’ Theorem.

What’s Better

The section on value in Chapter Thirteen is one of the better ones I’ve come across in recent months. Tyler interviewed a top sales guy by the name of Ryan Zimmer who appears to be top-notch when it comes to adding value to any sale. An acronym V.A.L.U.E. highlights, in some depth, what one needs to do to get customer buy in. The ‘U’ stands for Uniquely Different. Not your proposition but how your customers uniqueness will be seen by their customers.

Each chapter has a fulsome summary entitled Putting It All Together. I much prefer this style to those bullet points.

What’s Worse

As a Brit reviewing many North American sales publications, I have to accept that Americanisms will always be around. But I do draw the line at incorrect spelling. Chapter Fifteen was spelt Fifthteen. How did that get past the editorial team?

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

The Pirates Guide To Sales is a really smashing sales book. Not too long, not too short and gets to the nub of selling successfully. As a first publicaion, Tyler should be proud of himself.

Tags: behavioural science, Finding Customers, sales